I remember everything about my first drink — it was the sickly orange of diluted Gold Spot, it smelled like sweat it seemed to me, but it tasted exactly how I imagined it would — the acid burn of rebellion. I was 18 and in my first year of college. We had been talking about it for many days — my friends and I — and finally one afternoon we gathered ourselves, each one not wanting to be the loser who wimped out, yet all of us feeling that this was a bad idea that was likely to go so wrong. We set off from college and landed at Nungambakkam High Road. Someone knew a restaurant where you were allowed to bring your own bottle of booze. Pearl, it was called, and I remember the name like it is carved on a milestone. There was much arguing on the way to the restaurant about who would manage the task of actually buying the bottle at a wine store. It fell to me, alas, because I was the only one in that group whose parents did not live in the city. There were a few men staring and straggling outside the wine shop. I was nervous and the word Romanov was stuck in my throat. But as I pointed and waited, I saw by my side a thin woman in a dirty sari and with the dusty skin of a construction worker. She had with her two pouches of the state-controlled, colourless stuff. She snipped one, drained it in one long gulp, popped a banana in her mouth and did the same with the next — all in one smooth motion. I was too impressed to be shocked.
At Pearl, dark and dingy with an overbearing smell of air-conditioned mustiness, there was much anticipation and nervous laughter. The drinks were poured, unevenly. And drunk just as anxiously. There was that warmth gliding down your throat and the disappointment that you didn’t ‘feel’ any different. And then there was another drink, and maybe another. The waiters looked at us with immense curiosity and extreme distaste. It was Chennai in the mid-’90s, and just being able to buy a bottle of bad vodka and drink it without being busted by a parent or a professor seemed like a victory in itself. That day ended with a rickshaw ride, which made many, many puke stops. I wouldn’t say it was the best day ever, but it was pretty much up there.
No one in college drank. Well, some did, but they were notorious for other things as well. In hostel, where there were virtually no secrets, drinking stories were always whispered gossip. No one ever admitted to it. This, when even lesbianism was not a big deal. (At least, the watered down, college-hostel version of what went around was dismissed with a shrug.) But there was something about drinking that made it different. Maybe it wasn’t something ‘girls’ did. Or perhaps it was how high the risks were — what if you were seen, what if you were in a state, what if you couldn’t walk back, what if the news reached your parents? The hallways of college were filled with ghastly stories of some girl or the other, busted mid-drink by a family member, and forced into a quick marriage to an ugly man from a landed family in rural Andhra Pradesh.
We went to Pearl several times after that. And because of these stories, it was always rather thrilling. There were so many things to consider, several precautions to take. To be of reasonably adult drinking age and not being allowed to drink, seemed then like a travesty. There was the horror of buying it — in broad daylight — when anybody’s car could be going past the wine shop. Then the whole measuring, mixing conundrums. There was the worry of whether you’d be able to walk when you get up. Whether your friends would be? Whether we were speaking too loud and laughing louder? And each time the door of Pearl opened, there was the collective pause of suspended breaths. But most of all, there was the problem of linking the dark afternoon to the rest of our lives. We were, otherwise, good girls, but just the act of going to Pearl and having a drink made us feel like we were ready to take on whatever the adult world was going to throw at us. It was such a terrible sin to commit — at that time and in that place — that it was deliciously irresistible.
A year after I finished college, I moved to Mumbai for my MBA, where drinking decisions, like most things about the city, were stripped of romance or rebellion, and were entirely a matter of economics. Where was it cheaper? How long would it take to get there? In Mumbai, no one stares at you or what you’re drinking. Nobody bats an eyelid if they see you lined up outside a wine shop. And even if you buy a box of beer and carry it on your head, no one thinks they should find out who you are and tell your parents about it. In a city populated by such callous indifference, drinking doesn’t make you any cooler. It doesn’t mark you out or scream your rebellion. And while a cold beer on a humid, sweaty day might feel like a sip of heaven, it simply doesn’t make you feel like you’ve accomplished anything of substance. For those of us spoiled by judgemental Chennai, having a drink will never again be the exhilarating prospect it once was.
(Veena Venugopal is editor BLink and author of The Mother-in-Law . Follow her on Twitter @veenavenugopal )